> > Could you please explain why the MIME charset declaration must take
> > precedence over an explicit encoding declaration.
In addition, there are (or at least have been) MIME processing
engines that do transcoding of text/* MIME bodies without reference
to any of the internal content. You might wish that it were disallowed,
but it isn't. Since it is possible that some agent might change a
text/xml;charset=iso2022-jp to text/xml;charset=UTF8 without modifying
anything inside the body, being explicit about this possibility
seems like a good idea.
Larry